This isn’t the kind of family snap we’re used to seeing — but it is still insanely cute. A drone piloted by conservationists close to Vancouver Island captured this image of a family of orcas as they swam through the sea together.

We tend to think of nature as being both brutal and patriarchal. Animals struggle to survive and mate, and we assume that means that males will dominate. But some non-human species actually have matriarchies, that work out pretty well. Here's what nature can teach us about the secrets of making matriarchy work.

Researchers at West Point Military Academy developed Organizational,
Relationship and Contact Analyzer (ORCA) to help track insurgents in the Middle
East. Now several U.S. police departments are using it on criminal gangs.

Despite their fearsome nickname, orcas might actually be among the animal kingdom's biggest mama's boys. Males rely on their mothers to keep them alive well into their adulthood — and that might help explain the evolution of menopause.

Everybody, meet Iceberg. Iceberg looks and behaves like a lot of other killer whales, with one very big exception: Iceberg is entirely white. In fact, researchers say he's the only all-white, adult orca to ever be observed.

Have you ever listened to the complex sounds of a whale song and wished you could understand what's being said? Well here's your chance to help scientists make sense of these enigmatic underwater calls.

Every so often, the killer whales that live around Antarctica will drop everything they're doing and swim three thousand miles due north. It's an extreme journey, but the end result is the whale equivalent of a day at the spa.

If you saw the Seabreacher tearing around the waters of your local beach or bay, you'd probably assume that the killer whales had finally initiated their global coup and gone fully bionic. But you'd be wrong. (For now at least.)